Within the field of computing, many scenarios involve the presentation of a cursor on a display of a device. In many such scenarios, difficulties may arise due to the visibility of the cursor on the display; e.g., a user may have difficulty identifying the location of the cursor, and/or tracking movement of the cursor, if the cursor blends into a display background, including a “wallpaper” or static image presented on the background and/or a user interface element such as a window.
Various techniques may be utilized to facilitate the user in determining the location of the cursor. As a first example, the device may cause the cursor to blink at a specified frequency, or to rotate through various colors. As a second example, the device may detect the background color, and may present respective portions of the cursor in inverse colors; e.g., when the cursor is positioned over a black background, the device may present a white cursor, and vice versa. These and other techniques may draw the user's eye to the location of the cursor, and may therefore enable the user to interact with the device via the pointer.
Some techniques for presenting the cursor may utilize some framework hardware or software capabilities of the device. For example, a device may provide hardware and/or application library support for alpha blending to provide a smooth transition between cursor states, and the cursor may be presented by invoking such support to present the cursor with an inverse alpha blend. Because such underlying support may be more highly optimized for the other hardware and/or software capabilities of the device, and/or may integrate such alpha blending techniques at a lower level (e.g., a part of the display device driver), utilizing such resources may provide enhanced performance (e.g., reduced cursor movement latency and/or computational use) than ad-hoc alpha blending techniques developed specifically for and applied specifically to the display of the cursor.